


Rebellion

by serendipitousDescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 19:14:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1196358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serendipitousDescent/pseuds/serendipitousDescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day of terror led to the end of the world as John Egbert knew it. </p><p>A miscalculation separated him from everyone he'd ever known.</p><p>A reaction to the harshest words he'd ever heard ended in his own enslavement.</p><p>A note pulled him into a society he should have never been a part of.</p><p>It was only natural that he'd learned how to go with the flow. At least now that the expected had become the unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

John could have sworn that he was dreaming as he ran down the street. Nameless, faceless people ran alongside him, some speeding past him while others lagged behind. It felt like the sky should be dark and clouded over but it was clear and the day was bright. 

A scream echoed behind him, high-pitched and womanly. His limbs burned as he ran faster. John couldn’t force himself to look back, ignoring all of the things that his dad had taught him. The scream suddenly cut off just as he turned around a corner. In the same moment, someone crashed into him and he was sent flying to the ground. The people moving by didn’t even seem to notice him laying there.

His hand was crushed under someone’s foot, the pain drowned out by the adrenaline rushing through his body. John spared half a second to look behind him, to try and see what they were running from but all he could see was people’s legs rushing towards him. And then he was back up again, running for his life. 

“Hey!” someone to his left yelled.

“Fuck off!” another screamed back.

It took him a moment to realize that the words had come from his own mouth. A couple others around him were yelling things along the same lines though. 

All of a sudden John crashed into the person in front of him. And he could feel someone running into him at the same time. The adrenaline rushing through his blood seemed to drain away all at once as he noticed the way that people were scrambling to past each other. Some were trying to head back the way that he had just come. Others were doing what he was doing and keep going. They must have ran into a roadblock or even worse, another group of people coming from the opposite direction. Dread filled his stomach like a leaden ball. He started to fight to move forward, pushing people away so that he could get through.

John didn’t know how long he spent shoving his way through the crowd of desperate people but eventually he made it over to the other side. The only thing that he could see was a few stragglers staring in horror at the blockade of people in front of them. He stood there in much the same way, barely believing what was in front of his eyes.

This had to be some sort of dream. Any moment his alarm would ring and he would forget about this in a few short minutes. It would become nothing more than a half-remembered memory.

Then they came from around the corner and John knew that this wasn’t a dream.

His mind couldn’t come up with something this crazy.

They were tall, gangly creatures like something out of a science fiction movie. Skin-tight suits covered their bodies and there wasn’t a bit of skin showing. The only parts of their bodies that John could see was the candy-corn orange horns coming out of their helmets. Each one of them was armed with a type of gun he had never seen before, trained on the people in front of them. A few people fell to the ground with loud bangs that he hadn’t noticed before. But he had the strangest feeling that they didn’t need their weapons in order to kill them all if they really wanted.

The crowd behind John was slowly starting to realize that there was no escape, jolting towards the buildings on either side. Most of the doors were locked and the curtains were closed. It didn’t take a genius to realize that their own lives would have been up for sacrifice had they been unlocked.

John hated those people sitting up in their offices the most. Even the salesmen down below who cowered underneath their tills were less pathetic than they were.

A small group of people rushed past John, mostly young men only a year or two younger than he was. A couple of women were mixed in with the group too along with a couple of older teens. He stood there, staring at the group as they continued to run. The things at the front barely even looked at them and soon another twenty were laying dead on the ground. John’s eyes focused on the dead bodies. Any second now and they would pull themselves up and attack again. That was what always happened in the movies he had watched.

The good guys always won. 

Didn’t they?

Bangs echoed in his ears and the people banging on the shop doors started to fall to the ground. Some were screaming as they tried to look for a way to escape while even more tried to charge them. More and more people were being killed in front of John’s eyes and there was nothing that he could do about it. They were slowly getting closer and closer and he was certain that they were coming the direction he had come from as well.

John stayed rooted in place, incapable of willing his limbs in move in one direction or the other. They were close enough now that he could hear the clicks and hisses of their language from a couple of them. Tears welled up in his eyes as he realized that his last hopes were completely crushed. Humans weren’t capable of making sounds like that.

The screams stopped abruptly and John faintly wondered how many had been killed. How many were laying on the ground, never to see the light of day ever again? He gasped for air, a sob racking its way through his chest.

Soon, everyone that he ever knew would be nothing more than another body on the ground.

Soon, he would be another body.

There would be nothing to show that he was anything more than another statistic. He was nothing more than another statistic.

One of them suddenly broke off from the group and John’s heart jumped up to his throat. It headed towards him with its back straight and tall, strength exuding from its every pore. It kept getting closer and closer. John had never known a terror so deep as the one that he felt right then as it stood within a foot of him. His body was telling him to sink down to his knees in hopes that it would ignore him entirely. 

Harsh clicks came out of its mouth and John didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have the faintest idea of what he was being told.

It reached out and grabbed a hold of his chin, turning his head one way and then the other. The grip was oddly gentle but still so tight that John was certain that there would be bruises in a few short hours. If he lived that long.

It stuck a gloved finger into his mouth, feeling around. A warmth suddenly flooded his jeans and the thick smell of urine filled the air. John whimpered at the sudden display and it drew its finger out of his mouth, only for him to fall to his knees in humiliation. It hissed over its shoulder at one of the others standing there. The smaller one who stood at the front responded immediately.

John trembled there at its feet for a moment longer before it calmly walked around him. Comprehension was as far away from him as it possibly could be as the world around him suddenly turned blurry. Hot tears poured down his cheeks as another came forward from the group. That was almost almost worse than the last one as he spotted the skip in its step as it got closer to him. Cheerful. And far more demeaning than the one before it. 

A hand was placed on his shoulder and John refused to look up at the thing that was undoubtedly standing in front of him.

The contact was brief. It didn’t have to be anything other than brief, he realized, horrified. His body was heavy, so heavy that he couldn’t move any of his limbs. The edges of his vision turned black. Everything in front of him started to blur. His body hit the ground with a thud. He didn’t feel a single thing. 

The dark fought to overtake him.

It didn’t take much for John to give in. 

* * *

There was pain. Searing pain. Sharp pain. John had never felt anything like this before. It burned and throbbed and screamed and pulled. The pain was everything. He was the pain. Death would have been welcome. Death was welcome. It would soothe, comfort, erase him. Except there was nothing but the pain. With only one exception. The screaming.

The screaming. The screaming. The screaming. The screaming. 

John didn’t know when it started. When any of this started. There was nothing other than the pain. He couldn’t recall anything other than the pain. The pain was all-consuming. He felt like his head was burning. Like his nerves were being pulled out. One by one. Two by two. Three by three. The screaming grew hysterical. 

Hysterical. Hysterical. Hysterical. 

Screaming. Screaming. Screaming. Screaming.

There was nothing but the pain. The searing, white pain. Even the screaming was getting quieter. Disappearing. Fading away to nothing. He knew nothing but the pain. Not his name, his past, his parents, why he was there, where he was, what had happened just before this. Nothing. It was gone. Gone. Gone. Just like everything else was. That meant there was no reason to fight. Maybe there had been. But now it was gone.

The black was a welcome reprieve. 

Anything would have been. 

* * *

“Test subject #413 is waking up.”

“What do you mean ‘test subject #413 is waking up’, lowblood? None of the others in its sector are anywhere close to waking and neither was it!”

“I mean exactly what I say I mean, sir. It’s easy to see the way that its glance nuggets are moving. It’s a trait that we’ve been known to exhibit when we’re close to rising as well, if you weren’t aware of such a thing.”

“I knew that! I’m not a nook-sniffing dumbass. It just doesn’t make sense that it would be waking up now.”

John heard an exasperated sigh, matched with a low, groaning grumble. He couldn’t tell how far away from him they were but he kept his breathing even as he heard footsteps headed towards him. If he was quiet enough, maybe they wouldn’t realize that he was awake along with this #413. 

He was incapable of seeing anything wherever he was but it was soothing. It was impossible to move his mouth or really do that much more than flex his fingers either. The side of his head throbbed a bit, reminding him of a far off memory. But it was too far away for him to truly remember it. Everything other than this place had faded away, including his sense of time. There was no way to tell one moment from the next and honestly, he didn’t really care too. 

If John could stay right where he was for the rest of his life than he would be perfectly content. 

A loud gurgling noise startled John out of his thoughts. It was coming from somewhere below him and it felt like his surroundings were being sucked away from him. His eyes flew open, only to see a thick film of green in front of him. He started to thrash, trying to get away from the slime that was being sucked into some sort of vacuum below him. A useless endeavor. 

“There’s no doubting that it’s awake now,” the first person commented, “But there is the possibility that it has some sort of mechanism to protect it from harm while it’s sleeping that the others haven’t developed yet.”

“Possible but it seems a bit unlikely. This one was rated as delightly normal during the procedure and it was normal, at least up until now.”

“There had to have been something off.”

The slime made it difficult to move his limbs, made everything seem that much more difficult. His muscles strained at the effort that it took him. His skin was suddenly exposed to the cold air of the empty portion of the tube and John tried his best not to gag at the feeling of something being pulled out of his throat. There was no finesse to it. The slime clung to his skin even after the vacuum sucked most of it away.

His ears were next. The slime must have muffled most of the noises for now he could hear everything. Even as he continued to thrash around in the slime, he could hear the click-clacking of a keyboard as if it were right beside his ear. He could hear two people breathing. Three people. Seven people. Eighteen people. There was no way to count them all. Even the sound of a couple people talking about the sores on someone’s body from the slime was loud and clear. 

John managed to bring his hands up to his ears but it didn’t help any. The sounds were just as loud as they had been before. It made him crave the feeling of the slime completely surrounding him. But the slime was now down to his shoulders.

“Lowblood, do you know if it was one of the ones that had its blood taken away for study?” that first voiced asked.

“It wasn’t one of those ones. It probably would be in a lot worse shape right now if it had been,” the second muttered.

“You can barely see the damn thing!”

“You haven’t been paying much attention then, have you, highblood?”

“Shut it or I’ll make sure that you’re culled.”

John squeezed his eyes shut and dug the palms of his hands into his ears. The argument echoed through his head over and over again. It would be so much better if this all just ended. Anything would have been better than this pain. It didn’t even make sense why they would try and torture him like this. He didn’t know what they wanted from him but there had to be something. Right?

Tears started to flow down his face, despite his best attempts to hold them back. The slime was halfway down his chest now, forcing him to lean against the cold, harsh metal wall of the tank. The wounds on his body burned. Cuts and bruises that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. The tears started to flow harder as John realized that he didn’t even know if anyone he knew was still alive. 

John didn’t know how many people were like him, shoved into these small, metal tubes and surrounded by weird, green slime. Everyone he knew could still be laying on the streets of Seattle, never capable of seeing the light of day again.

A sob wracked through his body at the thought. He slid down the side of the tube as the slime reached his knees. Even the wild running of his own heart was too loud for him to listen to but he couldn’t stop it anymore than he could stop the slime from being sucked out of this place. John couldn’t stand up, he couldn’t stop crying, he couldn’t do anything other than lay there like a useless lump of meat. If the slime would pour back into this confinement than he could be at least partially content because then he could remain oblivious. 

Oblivion sounded so much better than awareness.

But oblivion wasn’t about to happen. The very last of the slime had been sucked away, leaving John to curl up in a ball at the bottom of the metal tube. A rush of cold air came at him as the thick glass in front of him slowly inched down into the floor. Everything started to get even louder still. He curled in tighter on himself with the hopes that it would all just go away.

The second voice snickered as the glass completely receded. “It's a small thing, isn't it? Can't say that I've seen too many species as small as this one. Although the Commander may be smaller than him, now that I think about it.”

“I demand that you stop your insolence. It’s highly disrespectful to compare the Commander to this thing,” the first one replied.

John whimpered as the snarling voices echoed through his mind. The two standing in front of him didn’t stop their bickering though, no matter how much he wished that they would. He let out a yelp as something suddenly grabbed his arm, sharp nails digging into his skin and yanking him out of the container he’d been in. 

The floor was cold underneath his bare feet. A cold draft was there as well, accented by the lack of clothes on his body. John couldn’t stop himself from opening his eyes and immediately wished he hadn’t as he saw the gray skinned creatures. It wasn’t sharp nails digging into him but claws the colour of night. Their eyes glowed in the soft lighting, one set blue and the other gold. He pushed himself away but the grip on his arm only grew tighter, making him cry out as the claws broke through the skin.

His other arm was grabbed, forcing him to reveal his body to them. It was impossible for John to even try and cover himself from their wandering eyes and they snarled at him for so much as trying. Not once did they grip lax. He doubted that it would have mattered anyways; his body was far too weak to try and break free. 

“It looks like this one will be culled! I don’t think I’ve seen anyone with blood this bright red,” the one on John’s right exclaimed. 

A woman, John guessed. Despite the wide grin filled too many teeth and the sharp, pointed horns, it was smaller than the other creature and there was no mistaking the swells of its breast. His gaze flickered back to the floor as he saw its grin widening. This was a dangerous game.

“Have you not been listening to any of the reports, lowblood?” the other demanded.

“Ha, as if I would listen to some highblood droning on and on about how well the attack is going! It’s boring. Well, it’s boring up until I come here and get to see all of our spoils in their pink, squishy weakness. It’s almost pitiable how weak they are.”

“You’re disgusting if you think you can feel something as complex as pity for these things. You’ll be the one culled sooner rather than later.”

John groaned as his legs gave way. The two monsters ignored him even as they held him there, the only thing stopping him from falling to the ground entirely. Any wishes he sent out for this all to be a dream weren’t being answered and despair was starting to fill him inch by inch. He didn’t even want to consider how he could understand them with the rough, guttural noises still there underneath the words he understood.

“Both of us know that I won’t be culled anytime soon, so just get on with it and tell me why this thing’s blood is bright candy red,” the woman said.

“None of the scientists are entirely sure what mutation it is but the entire race suffers from it. Obviously, the Empress would have none of her share of the spoils if we decided to cull them all for sharing the same mutation.”

“Fine then, you win this time. Now what should we do with it?”

“I’ll be taking it to the Commander while you’ll be attending to the rest of my duties here. You’d better hope that none of the other creatures wake up in the mean time.”

The female creature snarled at its counterpart and abruptly let go of his arm, only to stomp off. John didn’t feel anything other than gratefulness of its absence. The pain, nearly unbearable just a few moments before, had quieted down for a little while. 

It seemed like John wasn’t about to get any rest even a moment’s rest however as he was pulled along the long, dimly lit hall. His arms ached, generously letting him know that they would be covered in pretty purple in just a few short hours. He risked a quick glance around him. The same sort of long tubes that he had been inside of lined both sides of the hall. It sickened him to know that there was someone inside each of them. 

At least they were blissfully unaware.

The alien - because that was what it was, what it had to be, even if John didn’t want to think about it - didn’t say a single word to him as he was dragged along corridor and corridor. Admittedly, he wa grateful for it even if it made him feel a bit like he was someone’s pet. This entire thing already felt a bit too much like he was in some sort of science fiction novel without hearing the strange tones of the thing’s voice.

John stumbled to the ground as he was thrust forward. Eyes focused on the ground in a glare, he tried his best to block out the noise around him. It was a near impossible task as the creature had brought him into some sort of social area; people were talking in small groups all around him. Details of lives he didn’t care about flooded his ears without a single way to stop it.

“Commander! Permission to speak, please,” it said loudly.

The noise slowly started to quiet as the other things in the area took notice of the two of them. Or more specifically, of John laying on the ground.

“I request that you allow me to speak, Commander. The matter is rather urgent,” it tried again.

“And it fucking sounds like you’re going to keep speaking even if I don’t give you your stupid permission. Or are you enough of a dumbass not to recognize that I’m in the middle of something, even with you going around and bringing aliens.” 

The Commander’s voice was loud and harsh to John’s sensitive ears but he couldn’t stop himself from looking up from the floor once again. Bright red bioluminesce was the first thing to catch his eye, the bright red ring surrounded by yellow. They were captivating in a way that reminded him of demons. 

John’s staring wasn’t noticed or at least not commented upon. The Commander was far shorter than any of the other creatures that he had seen so far; its limbs shorter and not quite as thin. But that didn’t make the thing any less frightening. It only seemed like that was more the case as John looked upon the scowl carved into its features and there was no doubt in his mind that this one’s punch would be a lot harder than any of the other’s.

“I wholeheartedly apologize, sir,” the alien escorting you nervously responded, “But this one seems immune to the calming properties of the sopor slime unlike the others of its kind. I thought that it should be brought to your attention.”

“Of course it should be brought to my attention. That doesn’t mean that you have to bring the alien to me. I’m not the only one on this ship whose capable of dealing with anything; in fact, there’s several people who are far better at dealing with this sort of shit than I am,” the Commander snarled.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“That’s worth as much to me as a new load of sopor slime mixed in with the most heinous of grub feces. Leave and go back to whatever it was you were supposed to be doing before you landed yourself ass backwards in a quarter of a problem. Without the alien.”

It spared a singular glance at John before running off back to the hallways of obliviously trapped people. Human beings, just like him. He didn’t want to think about it anymore.

The Commander turned to him, the scowl still on his face. “Now what the fuck am I supposed to do with you?”


	2. Chapter 2

“I don’t fucking know why the waste-filled sopor addict thought that it was a good idea to bring you to me!” the Commander grumbled, “I couldn’t give a barfing fuck about any of this technical shit anyways. It’s all just grub blubbering mind fuddlery to me.”

The hand around John’s arm tightened as he struggled to stay on his feet but he refused to say a word. The pain of his knees constantly knocking together was more than enough to deal with without that rough, angry voice yelling at him as well. It had been terrifying enough the one time that monster had looked him in the eyes. The bright, glowing red had reminded him of the demons he’d heard stories about throughout his childhood.

More of the things stared at John as he was dragged down the hall. Their eyes lingered on him, not in curiosity or interest, but in disdain. His shoulders caved in and his pace started to slow but it only made the Commander tug at his arm harder. It quickly got to the point where his heels were digging into the smooth metal floor. Where he just ignored the pain radiating from his arm. And everywhere he looked, there were eyes staring back at him. 

Eyes of all colours, impossible or not. 

Eyes that were watching him. 

Eyes that glowed brightly in the dim lights. 

They only slowed as he did to watch him more carefully. The low, guttural noise of their voices did nothing to help as they talked of his shortcomings. Things that he’d never even noticed before, never thought about before because they’d never been problems. They’d never set him apart from other people.

They were the things that made him human.

“Would you stop doing that?” 

The growl thundered throughout John’s body. The back of his head slammed against the metal wall as the palms of the creature’s hands pressed roughly into his shoulders. Those demon red eyes were looking at him again. His breath faltered and he moved his gaze to the floor as the whispers around him attacked him. 

It felt like he was going to hurl what little was left in his stomach. The Commander wouldn’t stop staring at him and it was impossible to ignore. He’d been captured by a demon and there was no way to escape the punishment it would surely give. 

The whispers were only getting louder. 

The demon’s eyes narrowed.

All John could do was keep still, willing himself not to say a word.

His body suddenly fell to the ground as the Commander turned to face the vicious bystanders. The whispers quieted almost immediately and he nearly sobbed at the prospect of a moment of relief. But the thought soured in his mind as quickly as it came. Soon, many others would likely die for a moment of relief if this was anything to go by.

“Would you all shut your fucking chutes for an atomical grub-snatching moment? I’m not that sad and incompetent that I haven’t realized that you’re all braindead asswipes but go situate your totally unattractive lumps of fat somewhere not in the general vicinity.”

A sob racked through John’s body as the yell seemed to echo through the air. He curled up into a ball, wrapping his arms around his knees without a second thought. The backs of his eyes burned but he forced them shut in one last desperate attempt to keep what little was left of his pride. But even the feeling of his short, blunt fingernails digging into his soft skin wasn’t enough to stop the agony of everything else.

Only a few of the monsters hesitated before they fled down the hall and not a single one of them protested. But John wasn’t certain which was worse; being forced to march down the hallway with only the Commander as company or being surrounded by judging, disgusted eyes. At least he knew that the other creatures wouldn’t do a thing to him. They didn’t hold him in high enough regard to bother.

The Commander turned back to him, an unseen scowl on his face. “You’re about as useful as a knife in the middle of some pompous, overdramatic gunfight with far too many explosions, aren’t you?”

John didn’t say a word, his face buried into his knees.

“Let’s get going then. Those overinflated pieces of shit in the labs will likely bitch and complain if I don’t get you to them soon. Besides, they might be able to figure out what’s wrong with you.”

His teeth ground together but he gave no indication that he heard what that monster was telling him. If anything, his nails dug deeper into his skin. He couldn’t deny the feeling of hot wetness on his cheeks. He didn’t want to speak. He didn’t want to acknowledge that a monster was standing in front of him.

“Whatever, it’ll be easier this way anyways.”

John’s head shot up as the Commander grabbed a hold of his upper arm and yanked him up. There wasn’t even a moment for him to get his footing before the demon grabbed his thigh as well. It felt like the hand there was burning his skin and he thrashed in an attempt to get it away from him. 

The brute only grunted at John’s efforts, tightening its grip as if it had expected him to do this. Before he was even given a chance to figure out what was happening, he was hoisted up over the Commander’s shoulders. He flailed at the sudden height and clung onto the creature’s shoulders, his fingers digging into the thick fabric of the clothes it wore. It didn’t even flinch.

It started to walk down the hallway with ease. With a start, John noticed the arm between his legs as the fabric grated against the soft skin of his inner thighs. He became more and more aware of the material rubbing and grating against his bare skin with every step it took. 

He felt hopeless. 

There was nothing he could do but cling to the creature’s shoulders. His limbs lacked strength. Strength that could have allowed him to wrestle himself free. Instead, he was stuck like this. A red heat exploded in his chest, directed at himself, at the monster carrying him, at the people who were still inside those tiny, little tubes with no idea of what was going on around them.

The feeling dissipated the moment he heard footsteps again. 

The only thing that John felt that he could be grateful for was that the Commander didn’t say a single word. Because it wasn’t like the things that walked passed them felt the same courtesy. It made him sick to his stomach as he heard them talking about him. About how disgusting he was and that the Commander must want to get rid of him as soon as physically possible. That wasn’t even the worst of it. They talked loudly about how they were never going to get one of “that kind”, that they couldn’t understand the fetishists that had ordered the ones that they had captured without even knowing what they looked like first. 

A slave. That was all he was good for now. That was all any of the human race was good for now, if he was supposed to believe that those monsters were saying. He didn’t even know if he should be able to understand them like he could.

John didn’t notice when they were out of his hearing range, the clacks of their shoes against the metal of the floor long gone. His mind was far too preoccupied with other things. He wished he could just disappear into it, into his mind. Everything would be normal there. It wouldn’t be twisted. It wouldn’t be some sham of reality that just didn’t make sense to him.

The sound of a door swiftly closing behind him broke John from his thoughts. A yelp escaped from his mouth without permission. There was a moment of confusion before he felt cool metal below him instead of the strange, rough fabric of the clothes that the Commander wore.

“So you are capable of making noise then, are you? I was almost fooled into thinking that you were incapable of it but I suppose that was nothing more than some idiotic dumbfuckery that I thought up of with the expansive capabilities that my thinkpan contains,” the demon complained.

John glared up at him.The last thing he was about to do was give up the one advantage he had.

“What are you doing here with one of those things, sir?” someone else in the room sneered.

“What do you think I’m doing here? Does it look like I’m parading around the entire ship with a brain dead alien for no reason that your absurdly small thinkpan could even begin to think up? Oh, I know! You think that I’m bringing this degenerative bucket of waste around so that I can take it out on an alien date,” the Commander snorted, “What do you think about that, alien? Do you want me to take you out so that you can show me the obviously inferior romantic slights of your kind?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I was out of line.”

John turned to look at the other creature in the room. It was a lot taller than the Commander was, likely taller than any of the other things that he’d seen so far. And he could tell that it normally stood tall and proud. Now, it cowered. Made itself seem smaller in order to escape the other’s anger.

“Fuck, I thought that I told all of you snivelling piles of useless shit not to call me that!” the Commander said loudly.

“I can’t do that, sir. I’d rather not get culled any time soon,” the other thing replied, “Now, what is this thing doing here? It’s supposed to be in one of the recuperacoons.”

“I’m so glad that we’re going through this. It makes me want to see just how far a bullet would go if I were to shoot it into my forehead. Now, from what I understand, this pathetic, eye-duct leaking nimrod woke up and some fuckass didn’t know what to do about it. It’s your ridiculously useless excuse of a job to figure out why.”

“Why someone didn’t know what to do about it? Because, sir, that’s-”

“Of course I’m not talking about that. Why the fuck is this bundle of poignantly heartbreaking wastes and tissues fully conscious instead of enjoying sweet little dreams of grubs and hoofbeasts or whatever it is that these aliens dream of?”

“Right. Of course, sir.”

What sort of person was the Commander if another one of these monsters was so afraid of him? The other creature was tall to an almost ridiculous point, its muscles clearly visible through the skin-tight suit it wore. John wasn’t about to go placing money on the Commander if things went to blows between. 

This new demon moved closer, none of those fearful little words dripping from his mouth any more. A bitter metallic taste filled John’s mouth as he bit into the inside of his lip. His hands were shaking and there was nothing in this world could make them stop. There was only one show of strength that he could bring himself to show. Every other part of his body might have screaming out in fear but he didn’t look away. Even as his cheeks turned damp, he stared at the brute.

But His fear did nothing to stop him from slapping away the gnarled hand that tried to reach for him. Too many people had touched him, grabbed him in the last who knew how long. Yet he could already imagine the feeling of another handprint burning itself into his pale white skin. Warping it; turning it into something he’d never thought possible.

The freak snorted, forgetting who he was with once again, “Fiesty, isn’t it? It sounds like only about 10% of its population will end up surviving. Almost makes this entire thing useless, doesn’t it?”

“That’s not for me to decide. Now, shut up and get to work,” the Commander snapped.

It swallowed, “Sorry, sir. Is there any chance that you could… hold it down or something? I don’t want to get hit again.”

“I just have to fucking do everything myself, don’t I? It’s like nobody is capable of wiping their own wastes from their assholes without pleading with me to help them do it.”

“I understand, sir. I’ll just-”

“Did I say that I wasn’t going to do it? No? Then shut your drivelling chute and stop letting your imagination go around and around in circles because it’s getting dizzy and making up things that could never exist even in my wildest dreams.”

John’s eyes were wide, flickering back and forth between his two tormentors. The taller one reached for him a second time; its hand brushed against his shoulder for the briefest moment before he shook it off. The brevity of the contact didn’t make his skin feel any less like it was burning. That moment of distraction was all the Commander needed though. Those bright red luminescent eyes flashed in the corner of his gaze as the monster reached for him and his curled fist flew through the air.

It didn’t connect with anything. Instead, a hand wrapped around his wrist, stopping it in its place. He got the briefest look at the Commander’s face before he was gracelessly pinned down to the metal table. There wasn’t even enough time to figure out just what it was that he’d seen there. Not before the demon’s palms dug into his shoulders.

And then his mind was more focused on other things.

The rest of the world faded away as he tried to thrash and squirm away from the clawed hand reaching for him. Fighting back did nothing. Neither of those monsters said a word as the cold claw forced its way in between his lips, pulling them away to reveal the blunt teeth hidden there. It left a strange, rubbery taste in his mouth and left him craving something, anything to take that taste away.

That hardened claw retracted from his mouth. John immediately turned his head away, his mouth closing into a thin, hard line. 

“What are you doing, you mud-brained imbecile? This isn’t your chance to figure out what all its jiggly bits do. Just figure out what’s fucking wrong with him. The quicker, the better,” the demon said, its voice low.

“It’s hard to do that when I don’t know anything about its kind, sir. There’s only a handful of us that have been allowed to research these things and this is what-”

“And let me guess, none of them are on this ship.”

“No, sir. Though, there is one on-”

“It doesn’t matter. They aren’t here now, are they?”

“No, sir.”

“Then other than for your own monstrosus curiosity, there’s no point in you preforming this examination. I might as well just go bring it back to the recuperacoons like that hard headed fuckass who intelligence matches that of the dumbest types of rocks! This has become nothing more than a waste of time of all of our parts,” the Commander announced.

“No, you ca-”

John broke into a fit of coughing, the demonic thing letting go of him once it realized what was going on. He hadn’t meant to say anything; he wished that he hadn’t. The words had come out before he had fully even realized what was going on. And now his throat burned. It felt like it was on fire. There was something deeply wrong with him and there was no way to figure out what it was. His body curled up into a ball, one of his hands rubbing anxiously at his throat.

The two freaks were staring at him. He could feel their eyes on him, digging a hole deep inside of him and emptying out his insides with a blunt spoon. It wasn’t enough to will them away though and there was nothing more that he could do. He’d read too many books to be naive about what could lie ahead if he acted out. And his imagination was more than enough to fill in the gaps.

“Did that thing just try and speak? Imagine it! The prospect seems almost laughable, really. The reports that have been circulating around state that these aliens are missing several sections of the thinkpan and are poorly developed,” the brute went on, his eyes wide, “I wonder if it has something to do with the surgery. Perhaps we would be able to train them to do simple things. It would make their servitude to her Royal Condescension so much simpler.”

“You lot really are nothing more than useless lumps of poor work and cowardice, aren’t you? These things, no matter what the state of their mess of a thinkpan, are more than capable of speaking. I know this from first hand experience!” the Commander countered.

“Really? Wow, I don’t think that we’ve ever run into an intelligent race before.”

“Remember your place here, Miklai.”

There was an odd pause of silence, the bickering coming to a roaring stop. John’s eyes flickered between the two of them. He didn’t dare move even an inch, not when it was his own well-being on the line if one of them decided to attack the other. The brute’s odd nervousness had disapitated into something else, the emotion heavy in the room. Then it stepped back, its shoulders caving in on it.

“Right, sir,” it muttered, “I apologize for speaking out of line.”

* * *

John was alone.

It was hard to fathom, even as he stared at the mirror. There was no one in the bathroom with him, no one waiting for him outside. Just him, the large empty space, and this mirror. He wasn’t in some strange tube, filled with substances that he’d never seen before and he couldn’t figure out why. Not that he wasn’t grateful for not being shoved into a small, closed space but he could vaguely see why it would have been reasonable.

He reached up to touch his cheek, seeing the person in the mirror do the same. Their skin was deathly pale except where it had been bruised. There was one large splash of purple on their jawline and more hidden by the large sweater they wore. No glasses sat upon the bridge of their nose either, revealing the bright blue of their eyes. He watched as the figure ran its blunted fingernails over its chapped lips, wishing that he had a glass of water or something. There was no way the person in the mirror could be him though. They looked sickly and broken; two things that he definitely was not.

There was no other way to explain it though. Not when he was looking at his own reflection, far more affected by the horrors of what had to be a war. His own species wouldn’t just roll over and let this happen to them.

“They wo-”

Red, hot searing pain burst throughout his throat again, only made worse as John was thrown into a coughing fit once again. It almost seemed useless to even try to speak, but he wasn’t about to give up. His father had always told him that he was one of the most stubborn people he knew; if he couldn’t live up to anything else.

His eyes flickered down to his left hand. There had been far too much going on for him remember the feeling of his hand being crushed underneath someone’s foot. Not even an apology had been thrown his way afterwards. Now he could see thin scars there from where the bone must have broken through the skin. It hadn’t been long since it had happened, it couldn’t have been with the bruises still on his face. He was hesitant to find out how it was already healed.

“Karkitty!” John’s body froze up at the sound of the voice, “Are you in here? Someone said that you came here.”

The sound of the door opening had completely escaped him. He cursed his idiocy. This wasn’t the place where he could relax or let his guard down; he wasn’t certain that such a place existed any more. 

“Come out, come out, wherever you are! You know that hiding from me doesn’t work,” they giggled from the bedroom.

John forced himself to move towards the open door. He didn’t want to be found cowering in the bathroom, vulnerable and alone. It was time to face the monsters again. At least this time around, he knew what he was getting into. Silently, he swore to himself that he would never let them get the jump on him again. He would never let his guard down.

His courage only lasted a moment as he stood in the doorway. One of the freaks was standing in the room, just as he had expected. But their frame was familiar; the way that they held themselves tall and strong without any doubt in their own confidence. His heart dropped down into his stomach. A flash of one of those creatures walking towards him went through his mind, the force of it almost making him fall to his knees.

The alien turned around hardly a moment later, beaming at him. “Oh! So, you’re the one who everyone’s fussing about then. I didn’t think that Karkitty would bring you to his personal rooms.”

There was no way this could be true. He had never expected that he would see this one again.

“Hmm? I suppose that you can’t understand me, can you? There was something about that in the report but I never read through them all anyways,” it continued on, drawing out its words, “It would be a real catastrophe if you could and they were all wrong. Can you understand me?”

John hesitated before he slowly nodded. Everything about this creature seemed to rush towards him all at once but it was still the first one that had even bothered to try and talk to him nicely.

“You can? Oh, that’s purrfect!”

“Real-”

Another coughing fit overtook John as his throat burned from his attempt at speaking. The thing barely even blinked though, bouncing over to the large windows with much more enthusiasm than he had seen from any of the other monsters that inhabited this place.

“I’m supposed to get Karkitty down to the Communications Room but there’s no way that I can leave his room so dark and dreary like this. He has such a nice view from here too!” it announced, its hand firmly on its hips.

It opened the curtains in one smooth movement.

John stared, barely noticing as he fell to his knees. This was no terrain that he was familiar with. This wasn’t any terrain at all. It was just a black expanse of space filled only with the white glow of stars from far, far away and space ships. More space ships than he could count, really. Each one of them undoubtedly filled with thousands and thousands of these beasts. All of them looking to take over Earth, to do away with the one thing that meant the most to him and everyone else he’d ever known.

The strange creature bounded over to him and knelt down in front of him. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Now, how about we go and find Karkitty? He has a very impawtant call waiting for him!”

When John looked at its face, all he could see was the monster who had first approached him. The one who had stuck its fingers in his mouth without a second thought and with a confidence that only came from someone who had done it a thousand times before.

The monster who had condemned him to this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! This will also be posted to my tumblr account. You're more than welcome to follow me there at serendipitousdescent.tumblr.com if you want. (Totally not blatant self-advertisement. Of course not.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So many fish puns. You don't even know.

John stared at the door, his lips pursed. It had been closed for a long time now, yet he still didn’t have the slightest clue on what was going on on the other side of it.

There was a dull ache in his back as he leaned against the metal wall. Time had started to slip away from him and not knowing was starting to bother him. It was like there was something itching in the back of his mind, something that he just couldn’t quite scratch. A feather tickling that same spot, ever so lightly, while he had no way to get it to stop. He needed to know how long he’d been in this hellhole for.

Dave would have known.

It came to him suddenly; he hadn’t even thought of his friend since he’d came to this place. The thought that he’d forgotten them made him sick. 

Dave would have been able to tell him the time right down to the second without thinking twice. But Dave was likely dead, incapacitated, or worse. Probably dead. It wasn’t hard for John to draw up the image of Dave charging those beasts with that shitty katana that sat on the wall in his room. And even if he had been captured, he would have been calm about the entire thing. He would have made fun of the demons surrounding him and made light of the situation.

Just as Rose would have calmly assessed the situation, never betraying her true thoughts about them. John didn’t doubt it, not for a moment. She would have done her best to stay in charge of the situation. She would have picked the entire thing apart and known what and when she should do anything. 

And then there was Jade. Sweet, sweet Jade. She wouldn’t have even made it this far. She would have fought with every inch of her being and not given up until she was dead on the ground. If she had been in his spot, she would have resisted every moment of it. She wouldn’t have stopped to wonder how long she had been in this place.

All of them would have been better off in this spot than he was.

John knew that he was too much of a coward to face this the way that he should. Even now, he envied the people who still slept, oblivious to the horror of what was going on around them. And when he wasn’t afraid, when he wasn’t acting like a coward, he was too emotional. He reacted to the smallest, little thing that happened to him and it never occurred to him not to at the time. It seemed like he could go from wanting to kill everyone in sight to praying that they wouldn’t so much as look at him in a matter of seconds. It made him hate himself.

His fists clenched at the thought of it; his eyes glued to the door. The strange creature from before stood beside him, rocking back and forth on its feet as it waited. It was a lot more carefree than he was.

This wasn’t the way he should be thinking about this. It was better, really, that he was here instead of any of his friends. This wasn’t something he’d wish on them in place of himself. If he was here and they were there then that meant they could still try and do something about this. 

They would be able to do so much if they tried.

“Ah! I never introduced myself to you, did I?” the monster standing next to him asked, its rocking coming to a stop. It didn’t wait for a response before it barreled on, enthusiastically, “My name is Nepeta Leijon and I’m a Grimeowseek; I mean, a Grimalseek. I’d ask fur your name but talking seems to hurt you so I won’t.”

Nepeta grinned at him but John just felt sick to his stomach. The growling undertones of the drawn out words disgusted him; they were a constant reminder that it wasn’t human. The little voice in the back of his head telling him that he shouldn’t be able to understand it at all only made it worse. He managed to slowly nod his head and its grin grew wider. It was easy to pretend that he could see traces of manic there, hidden beneath the layers of happiness.

“You know, Karkitty isn’t as scary as he looks. He may try to scratch you but inside, he’s nothing more than a fluffy kitty-cat. Adorabloodthirsty is what an old friend of ours used to call him!”

John gave a noncommittal shrug, hoping that it would pick up on his disinterest.

It didn’t seem to notice. 

“It’s really all just a big act. The pawple on the ship don’t respect him as it is, so unless he shows that he’s a big, nasty pussy cat, they won’t listen to him at all! And the big bad lady would -”

“Nepeta, I hope that you’re not spreading that horrid sob story around where any one can hear it. It’s bad enough that you’re talking to that degenerative waste of space at all! I don’t want you telling it all about the tragedy that is my life, even if it doesn’t seem to be capable of comprehending you,” the Commander cut in as he stepped out of the room.

“It can, Karkit-”

“Stop calling me that!”

“It can understand me, Karkat.”

“What did it do? Tell you that? It hasn’t spoken a single word since it got here and it’s not for a lack of trying like a desperate fool who doesn’t understand any of the life-threatening consequences of what it’s trying to do. Whatever.”

Nepeta’s shoulders slumped, all of its previous excitement drained out of it. “So, what did the-”

“Nothing yet. Just your average, fucking boring report of how things are going. She wants to see it.”

“Oh.”

John looked over at the Commander, their eyes locking. This time, the glowing red didn’t make him look away, though he wished that he could. He wished that he could look back down to the floor and pretend that there was nothing more than the next time he’d get to eat going on in his mind. But there was something else going on.

If he couldn’t be as cool as Dave, as calculating as Rose, or as brave as Jade then he could at least try and adapt to the situation. He had to accept that things were never going to go back to the way that they had been before now. And this was the first step.

His legs wobbled as he stood up. The Commander - Karkat - didn’t even pretend to be shocked. John was starting to realize that underlying manipulation wasn’t something that happened here; just the blatant, in-your-face type of manipulation. He reminded himself that this wasn’t the time to be giving up, that he couldn’t give up. Not here and not now. If he couldn’t refuse to become part of the masses than this was all useless. And doing that meant facing whatever was inside that room.

“You know, you’re not as dumb as you look,” Karkat muttered as John followed him into the room.

There was nothing that could have prepared him for what was inside.

One of those monsters was on a screen the size of the entire back wall, its features far more feminine than any of the others he’d seen. It was staring at him. Grinning at him. Picking him apart, piece by piece. It made him feel like he was translucent. There was nothing that he could hide from it. Not with eyes like those. Eyes that had obviously seen the destruction of the universe and had liked what they’d seen there. 

“This one’s a hell of a lot better lookin’ than the last catch of ‘em.” The words echoed through the room, the weight that they were carried with almost completely overpowering. 

“The last batch weren’t even capable of feeding themselves,” the Commander responded, dryly. 

“Ha! It’s hard ta believe that they were even capelin of evolvin’ as much as ‘ey did before we decided ta jump in and shake things up a betta. How smelt does he seem to ya?”

“Smelt?”

“Smelt. Smart. Ya gotta stay on top on these things, Vantas.”

Her teeth were pointed. The tips of them were so sharp that even the smallest prick would have drawn blood. John stared at her, transfixed. Her eyelids seemed to sparkle but surely that was only the trick of an eye. She seemed exotic, foreign, even compared to the others of her kind. Gold hoops decorated the two fins that extended from her head in place of ears and a golden tiara wrapped around her forehead. There was hardly even any areas free of jewellery on her arms. And the two, candy-corn coloured horns that sprouted from the top of her head were longer than any of the other monster’s he’d seen.

Her differences made her dangerous and John had never seen a sight so terrifying. 

“We’re running on the assumption that it’s incapable of independent thought at the moment but it’s yet to be seen if this thing’s idiocy is unique to it or if it’s a widespread problem throughout the entire population,” the Commander said, the words barely forced out of its mouth.

“It’d be a real glubbin’ pity if they were capelin of it.”

A heartbeat of silence passed.

John’s legs turned to jelly and he fell to his knees beside the large chair in the middle of the room. The demon didn’t even notice, even though the thing on the screen couldn’t seem to take her eyes off of him. Stripping away his privacy. His right to his own mind. As if the dirt on the ground was more valuable than he was. And he had no doubt that she found the greatest joy out of doing it. 

Her grin grew wider at the sight of him on the floor. He could see every little detail of her teeth; from the faint traces of fuchsia on some of them to the dark gray gums that held them in place. It wouldn’t take any effort for her to rip him apart. He would be in pieces before he even realized what was going on.

“A great loss, I’m sure,” the red-eyed monster replied, “But in the mean time, what is it that you want me to do with this one?”

She just stared at the Commander, expectantly.

It looked like it had just swallowed something bitter as it forced the next words out of its mouth, “What do you want me to do with this one, Your Imperious Condescension?”

“Just stick it back in a recuperacoon with the other lings. Ya shouldn’t ‘ave a problem with that, right, Commander? An’ if ya find it awake again, don’t do anyfin about it. It wouldn’t glubbing die in there and elver if does, that just opens up an angler spot for the next catch of ‘em,” she said with a faint shrug of her shoulders.

“Of course. That’s what I was thinking as well.”

The Commander stood. John only barely recognized the movement out of the corner of his eyes, his insides reduced to a faint blur of nothing. Flashes of memory zipped through his head. That green goop surrounding him, suffocating him, killing him. He was incapable of moving, incapable of screaming. The only thing stopping him from surrendering to insanity was that he couldn’t do anything at all. He couldn’t go back inside of there. Not again. Never again.

“Did I say tha’ ya were disfished, Vantas? Even my most louvar just can’t get up an’ leave before I glubbin say they can,” she trilled.

Karkat sat down again, its hands clenching onto the armrests. “What else is there to discuss, madam?”

Her grin morphed into a smirk as wide dangerous as a shark’s and John was certain that the waters they were treading in were bloody. “I wanted ta talk ta ya about the plan for the catch of lings that we’ve got here. You’re the only one who’s had reel fish hand experience dealin’ with these carps outside of the polluted waters that they have for a planet.”

“I don’t think that dealing with one of these dumbfucks counts as having experience.”

“Nonsense. We need ta figar what we’re goin’ ta do with ‘em before ya get back ta the main school, otherwise they’ll all just end up bein’ shipped to the camps an’ that would be a waste. Your school will be swimmin’ back out again only a few days after ya get back.”

“Already? My men deserve a longer break! We’ve been running around the entire fucking galaxy for you for the past six perigrees and they haven’t been able to so much as talk to their quadrantmates in that time,” the demon shouted, nearly standing once again.

“Would ya prefin that your helmsman an’ the little Leijon be transfished elseweever? I know of many a place where they could be put ta good use.”

It slumped back in its seat. John’s eyes continuously flickered between the two monsters, unsure of his place in all of this. It was impossible to figure out which of the two would kill him faster if the want to passed them by. He looked towards the door. Three steps and he’d be there. But how many would it take for the Commander to grab him? How many seconds would pass by before his fate was sealed?

“So? What do ya think we should do with ‘em, Commander Vantas?” she asked again.

“Sell off as many as we can as slaves,” it responded after a moment’s hesitation, “They’re exotic. Some will want them just for their looks. And while they’re stupider than a… a drugged-up lowblood in the process of molting, I don’t think that caring for themselves will be much of a problem when it comes down to it.”

“That would make ‘em smarter than yer average rust blood then. There will have to be a shrimp-sized group set aside though.”

“What for?”

“The ruddel forces have been makin’ a mess again. If we bichir the lings in public then they better carp down for a while. It shows ‘em just how easily we could rip apart their silly little ruddellion if we fancied the idea of it.”

“But that would just make them-”

“I know what I’m doing, Vantas. I have a few thousands of sweeps more glubbin expufferfish on the matter than ya do.”

“...How many will you need?”

“A brillion should work, but maybe put two brillion ashore just in case things get any carpier.”

John felt sick to his stomach as he heard those words come from her twisted, black mouth. A billion people to be butchered in cold blood and neither of them could show the basic sense of empathy towards the number of lives that would be lost. Lost for no reason. And for nothing more than a petty monster’s whims. His throat clenched while he imagined the rows and rows of people, the ocean of blood, the demons watching. 

It was disgusting. 

Everything about this thing was disgusting. 

“Regardless of what you plan to do with a few hundred thousand snivelling aliens, the rest should be sent to some of the resource-rich planets that haven’t been so much as touched since you decided that it would be a good idea to kill off all their inhabitants. Lolar, perhaps, or maybe Lofaf,” the Commander said.

“I was thinkin’ that it would be better ta shove ‘em into the sex industry. The number of whores being krilled because of rough black-play keeps going up and up. Besides, I think they’re on the pretty side, don’t ya? In a soft, innocent kind of way. Of coho, I’m sure that a thousand or two could put put ashore for your little trollitarian project.”

Whores. 

The rest of the human race would be reduced to being a whore, a slave, free labour or butchered meat.

The air grew thick as words repeated themselves in John’s mind over again. And again. And again. And again. Then he thought of Dave laying on the ground as his bright red blood spilled from his body. Rose stuck working the fields of some unknown planet light years away. Jade, broken and bruised as one of these monsters fucked her into submission. And his dad, the one person who had always supported him, forced to do everything that one of these monsters told him to.

“You si-” Something burned in the back of his throat for the briefest moment before giving away; his voice harsh growls and rough clicks, “You sick fuck! Bitch, I’m going to kill you!”

John lunged for the screen, thoughts of his loved ones moving him forward. 

And then he was on the ground. Pain radiated from his stomach as he clutched at it. His head was pounding and someone was saying something but he couldn’t understand it. It was all just white noise to him.

His breath faltered. He was barely capable of holding his body up as he started to dry heave. But there was nothing left in his stomach to come up, no matter how that blow had hit him. That red eyed demon stood overtop of him, scowling. Everything seemed to be shaking, the room off kilter. No, he was shaking. His arms were shaking, his body was shaking. He was the one who was off kilter.

“An’ it seems that they’re capelin of speech. Curse my glubbin’ unfortuna,” she mused.

The words seemed far away though. Everything had seemed so loud before but now it was like she was a million miles away. John wished that she were that far away. He wished that when he looked to his right, he couldn’t see her there, staring at him. 

A yell came from his mouth as his thick black hair was grabbed, forcing him up onto his knees. His scalp burned from the feeling of his hair being yanked and he tried his best to blink away the tears that were filling his eyes. He wanted to fight and yell and scream. He wanted to show them that he wasn’t about to just let this happen to him, to the people he loved. But whatever strength had possessed him just a few moments before had faded away into nothing. 

Leaving behind the weak coward he knew he was.

“How dare you say such words to Her Imperious Condescension?” the Commander shouted in his face.

John’s head spun. He stared blankly at the greyed skin of the monster, absentmindedly noting how the red of its eyes seemed to be more intense than they usually were. “I…” he started, before trailing off as not a word that came to his mind would been enough to defend him.

The force of the blow to his face was enough to whip his head to the side and seconds later, he was on the floor. Wet tears dripped down his face as he looked down at the ground. It was impossible to tell where the pain was coming from now.

It all felt a bit like he was in a dream.

A nightmare, maybe.

Everything seemed so far away.

“Excuse me, but I need to show this hair-brained excuse of a living creature that it has no place in this mirthful existence where its actions could be excused. And then it’s going straight back into a recuperacoon and it won’t be coming out until it’s time to butcher it like the useless animal it is,” the red eyed demon snarled, standing so far up above him.

“Nah, I think that I have a much more intertrenching way of dealin’ with it an’ yur recent insardination,” she said, before the situation escalated further.

“My recent insubordination? I’m sorry but you couldn’t get someone who was more loyal to you than if you managed to clone yourself and then indoctrinated that clone into thinking that you’re a fucking god who should be worshipped at all costs. And of fucking course, if that clone ever even thought of taking your place, you would convince it that you could just take it back inside of yourself, erasing its existence.”

“Ya better be really glubbin glad that I find yur angry ramblin’s amusin’, Vantas. But even if ya are loyal ta me, yur not excused from speakin’ up against me.”

Karkat tensed.

“An’ now, that little, delicarp alien isn’t goin’ be put back in a recuperacoon any moor. Actunally, I think tha’ it would be best if ya were in charge of the carp and its paper-thin skin for at least the next sweep. An’ of course, they’ll be extreme consekoinces if anyfin happens to it. Who knows, I might just let ya keep it after the sweep’s up.”

“Ma’am, I-” 

“No excuses, Vantas. And no koistions either; I hate ‘em. It would be bad if I suddenly discovered that you ain’t as loyal ta me as I think ya are, wouldn’t it? Now get out. Ya should punfish that carp before it starts ta think that it’s more important than it reelly is. That would be a reel bother.”

“Of course, Your Imperious Condescension.”

* * *

Jade. 

Jade with her long, thick hair and wide, green eyes. Her smile that looked like it could power a million suns if they could see it. Her excited ramblings when she’d just learnt something new, when she found a new theory about something she was passionate about. And she was passionate about everything. 

Dave.

Dave with his “cool” aviators that truly hid the coolest eyes that he’d ever seen. His impassive rants about this and that that betrayed the persona that he’d built for himself. The way that he’d use random quotes in the name of irony which only proved how much of a dork he really was. He’d deny it until the day he died but he really enjoy watching all those “lame” movies.

Rose.

Rose with her small, knowing smile that made him feel like there wasn’t a thing that he could hide from her. Her genuine interest in the people around her that was so much more than anyone else ever seemed to be able to manage. And then there was her laughter that was as rare as snow in middle of July yet made it feel like everything was right in the world. 

His dad.

His dad with his trademark pipe and pristine suit. The one person who was always there for him, through thick and thin. There was no doubt with his dad that he would be supported no matter what he did. His dad made him feel important and loved and had done everything in the world for him ever since he’d been born. 

“I’m proud of you, son.”

* * *

The smooth floor was cold against John’s cheek but he didn’t move, he didn’t want to move. It was like everything that he’d thought was important, wasn’t. 

John should have been angry. He should have been upset. He should have been mourning for a life and a planet and the rest of the human race. Instead, he couldn’t bring himself to feel anything at all. Nothing but indifference towards the life that he thought he’d have. Even moving from where he laid on the floor was a problem. There was no point to it all if he was just going to be kept as that monster’s pet.

He was in the Commander’s room again. Nepeta hadn’t managed to stop it from shoving him down the hallway and locking him in its room until it could come back to beat him at a better time. 

At least, that was what he’d assumed from that demon’s snarling words.

It was impossible to tell how long he’d been laying there. Even when he opened his eyes, the room was still in the same dimmed state that it had been in when he closed them. Even the curtains had been drawn closed again. Minutes or hours, he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure if it mattered anymore.

A shift of something was the only warning John had before the blunted tip of a person’s foot jammed into his back. His face was smushed into the cold, unforgiving floor. Just as swift and hard, they kicked him again, this time in his side.

He curled up tightly in an attempt to counteract the damage as they kicked him again. And again. And again. A scream built up in the back of his throat but he refused to let it free. He didn’t feel anything. He refused to feel anything. After everything that had happened, he didn’t care if the sweet arms of death were about to welcome him with a bang. It seemed like the Commander could give two shits about the punishment that it had been promised by her.

“You freak! How dare they let some weakling like you continue to exist!” they shouted.

It wasn’t Karkat. 

It wasn’t the Commander.

It wasn’t the red-eyed demon.

His body tensed, preparing for the blows as much as he could. If he was going to die it wasn’t going to be because some freak had decided to attack him because they thought he was weak. His father’s words, the ones he’d heard so many times, repeated themselves in his mind. 

His dad wouldn’t be proud of him if he let some random alien beat him to death. He couldn’t be proud of himself if he let that happen. It didn’t matter that there was only so much more he could take. It didn’t matter if he wasn’t certain he could last much longer. He would give up when the Commander had the nerve to come and kill him itself.

Time seemed to slow down as he tried to scramble away. Adrenaline filled him and the pain left his body, a temporary respite. He barely managed to get a glimpse of their face before they came at him again, fists flying. Their indigo eyes burned into his mind, glowing almost as brightly as the Commander’s had. His arms moved to protect his face and stomach, his legs wildly kicking in front of him to try and keep as much distance between them as possible.

“You bastard!” they cried out, their voice higher than before

A fist hit his arm. John looked up. The points of their candy corn horns were far too close to his face for comfort. But the blows were continuous, neverending. He thrashed and wiggled as much as he could. Yet there was nothing that he could do to stop this terror.

“Stop!”

The body on top of him was suddenly ripped away and he managed to scramble away, his back against the wall. It took him precious seconds to realize that the rasping gasps were his own and even longer for his vision to clear. He clutched at the wall, his hands sliding down it.

Karkat was there. 

The Commander was punching in his attacker’s face and he could barely see it. If it weren’t for the fact that that red-eyed demon was a foot shorter than the other alien, he wouldn’t have been able to tell at all. His vision was blurry. Everything was blurry as he cowered against the wall.

John struggled to control his breathing. Even as he focused on it, it faltered and turned and just wouldn’t come evenly like it was supposed to. When he looked up again, the thing that had attacked him was stumbling out the door while the Commander shouted at it. He couldn’t make out the words. He could barely hear the words. 

He shut his eyes tightly. The rest of the world needed to be blocked out. He needed oblivion. Black nothingness. Only then would he be content with this. With whatever was going to come next. The adrenaline was gone, the pain spreading throughout his body worse than anything that he’d ever felt before. Including the time he’d fallen from a tree and broken his collarbone. It couldn’t even be compared.

Seconds passed.

Minutes went by.

When John opened his eyes again, those glowing red eyes were staring down at him, boring into his very soul. Its face was expressionless. But he knew that there had to be some sort of anger there somewhere. There hadn’t been one time over the last who knew how long that the Commander hadn’t been angry.

“Get up.”

“No.”

Familiar irritation flickered through the monster’s eyes. “If you don’t get up then something like this will happen again. Some lunatic bimbo who doesn’t realize that I could kick their good for nothing ass into the next perigree will come in here with the thought that I would be so ecstatic that my head would explode from the mere upset balance of chemicals in my body if I could dump your useless, waste riddled fucking self into the nearest waste chute.”

“And why should I care?”

“Because I’m not ready to be murdered in front of the only people who are even vaguely close and then have my name wiped from existence. I’ve been told that it’s not a fucking pleasant experience by everyone from your palemate to some random asshole seadweller’s lusus. Neither of which could ever bring themselves to give to shits about me. Oh, and not to mention that it’s your fucking life that’s on the line as well, unless you want to serve as some glorious example to the rest of your fucking species without so much as a quarter of a thinkpan. Half of one if they try really, really hard.”

John clenched his hands, rising to his feet. “Oh, and you think that I care about your stupid excuse of a life? I’m going to end up dead anyways! So, I might as well make sure that one of you bastards go down with me.”

“I do because guess what? It just so happens that I’m the closest thing that you have to a chance of surviving this sick place, even if that means that your chance would be rather small and pathetic.”

“Fine.”

Karkat paused for a moment, taking in the words but John was already standing up. His legs ached as they supported his weight, the last thing he needed was to be walking around. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. He thought of his friends and his dad again. They would keep him going, at least for a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! This will also be posted to my tumblr account. You're more than welcome to follow me there at serendipitousdescent.tumblr.com if you want. (Totally not blatant self-advertisement. Of course not.)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had a bit of trouble with this one. It just didn't seem to want to be written. Anyways, it's here even if I'm not entirely pleased with the end of the chapter!

Claws were digging deep into John’s hair, forcing his head up and providing clarity that he was certain he wouldn’t have otherwise. Even through the sharp pain, it was still a struggle to cut through the fog surrounding him and focus on what was going on around him. Someone was shouting or maybe it was a group of people but the screams seemed far off in the distance, so far away that if he just closed his eyes than it would all fade away.

“Shut up, you useless sacks of meat!”

The loud, commanding voice snapped him out of his oblivion. 

All of the sudden John saw the hundreds of trolls gathered in the mess hall below. They were angry, no, furious at the sight of him being there. And those that weren’t angry, the ones that he could see standing along the edges of the group, they were the ones who were consumed with disgust. It was as if they thought it was his own fault that he was so weak in comparison to them, that it was his own fault that his skin could be broken with such ease. And maybe it was his fault.

Those claws let go of him and his body collapsed down to the floor. He couldn’t summon up the strength to hold himself up, to do anything more than sit there, just out of view of those vicious monsters.

“I told you to shut your god forsaken mouths before I go down there and close them myself!” the Commander shouted and the room went quiet. 

John stared up at the sight of Karkat glowering down at his own men and women. His entire body was vibrating with tension and rage. Those grotesque creatures didn’t dare to say a word against the Commander; they didn’t dare to move a single inch from where they stood. Only the densest of idiots would go up against such a fearsome freak of nature.

Not that John had ever been known for his outstanding intelligence. 

“I’m glad to see that you fucking miscreants do have some sense left in your barely formed thinkpans,” the Commander carried on, “By your loud, obnoxious chatter, I’m certain that you’ve noticed the weak, little fleshling that I’ve been dragging around for the last few hours and I know for a fact that not all of you appreciate his or the rest of his good for nothing kind’s presence here on this ship. Now, this is something I’m only going to tell you once. Get. The. Fuck. Over. It. The rest of them will be gone soon enough but this one will staying for the undetermined future and there’s nothing that any of you fuckfaces can do about it. At least, not without getting culled.”

That started to stir the crowd, the low murmur of whispered rumours filling the room. Maybe if the Commander’s words weren’t so harsh than they wouldn’t have reacted the way they did. Maybe if John had been stronger, taller, useful. Maybe if they hadn’t seen human nature at one of its lowest points in all of its history.

“You think that we want a freak like that on board our ship, Commander?” a shout came from the middle of the crowd.

“It doesn’t matter what you-”

“We’re not some sort of hotel for these disgusting things!” another screamed.

“How are we supposed to know that you’re not keeping it for your own sick pleasure?!”

The fear-driven shouts grew louder and louder. The thundering noise of them vibrated in John’s ears, the pain feeling as if someone had taken a hammer to his head. And Karkat just stood there, not saying a word. His fists were clenched around the metal railing, his grip so tight that John feared that it would break and crumble into pieces. 

He tried his best to ignore the words that were being shouted at him. It would be better if they thought he couldn’t understand them. Because only then would he be able to ignore the insults, the abuse of his race, of his loved ones, of himself. If they thought he couldn’t understand them than he could ignore the voice in the back of his mind that yelled and screamed in protest against these atrocities, making him want nothing more than to stand up and scream at them instead. 

The screeching drew to a silence as Karkat didn’t say a word. 

“Are you done?” the Commander asked.

Silence was his only answer.

“Her Royal Condescension was the one who ordered that I keep this thing and it’s suicide to believe that her word should not be followed. It will not attack you in your recuperacoon or walk around doing anything more than being the weak, fleshy thing that it is. It won’t be able to. And the reason for that is this. Bring it out!” he commanded.

What happened next was impossible. 

Two trolls brought in a bruised and battered human, a flock of white blond hair on their head. Their clothes were torn and bloodied but familiar. They fought the entire way, not allowing John to get a proper look at them until blood-red eyes connected with his own. It was then that he realized why he hadn’t been able to recognize them right away, other than the blood dripping down their lip and their cheek swelled up to the point where they could barely see. There was no opaque sunglasses on their face. 

John scrambled up to his feet, ignoring the way that his body protested. 

“Dave!” he screamed.

His best friend yelled something back at him but the words got caught in the back of his throat. Tears were streaming down John’s face but he didn’t notice. The only thing he noticed was the hysterical thoughts running through his mind. 

How had they known?

Did they have his dad hidden away somewhere, just in case he misbehaved?

Or Jade?

Or Rose?

Dave broke free, wrenching his arm away from the iron-clad grip at a painful angle. John was mere seconds away from flinging himself over the railing and the Commander did nothing to stop him from doing so. The howling echoing through the room was almost heart wrenching and he just wished that they would stop. Nobody else in this room cared about Dave as much as he did. They didn’t know him. They would never know him like he did.

And then Dave’s body froze. 

It was unnatural in the the way that it stopped in mid-step. It was unnatural how a red dot appeared on his forehead, his hair pushed back by incessant worrying. It was unnatural how he fell to the ground, his body limp and-

And-

And-

.

.

.

John woke up to the sound of screaming. A moment passed by and then another before he finally realized that the wretched noise was coming from his own mouth. 

It stopped then and he could feel the harsh burn in his throat from overuse. It felt like he had been screaming for hours. His cheeks were wet and the blanket underneath his head was soaked from his tears. A sob rippled through his body as he remembered the dream, the vivid image of Dave falling to the ground from a bullet to the head. 

Those night terrors had been haunting him every time he slept for as long as he’d been here. Every night it was someone different. Every night he had to watch the people he loved die over and over again because of him. But it hadn’t happened quite like that and he had to keep reminding himself of that. Nobody had been killed; they didn’t know who Jade, Rose, Dave or his dad were. 

Once his dad would have come running at the sound of him screaming in his sleep. Even when he’d been haunted by nightmares every night for an entire month when he’d been 8, his dad still came to him every night. It only made this so much more terrifying.

John forced his eyes open. 

The room around him was empty, just as it had been every time he’d woken up here. He was grateful for the privacy. The last thing he wanted was for the Commander to hear him screaming in his sleep; to hear him crying out for people who would never be there for him again. But he couldn’t deny that the silence was pressing in on him, making him feel suffocated in this place. There was no music here, not even the endless chatter that had never even registered in his mind before.

That train of thought was cut off as he stood, resigning himself to the new day. The distant aches of his body went by unnoticed and he forced himself to stop thinking of a world that had been shattered into pieces. 

He readied himself for the day, pulling on clothes emblazoned with the symbol only the   
Commander wore and running his fingers through his tangled hair. The door opened as he walked in front of it and it closed behind him with a swish. 

He was as ready as he was ever going to be.

* * *

“I hate you!”

Click. 

“Oh, as if you’re capable of an emotion as complex as hate! You wouldn’t know how to hate someone if they slammed you against the wall and dug their claws into your skin while shoving their tongue down your throat. Trust me, I’ve tried it!”

Clack.

“You call that trying? Ha! I’ve had better hatefucks back before I even molted.”

Click.

“With that teensy little bulge of yours? I’m going to bet that you got off by being fucked instead of the other way around! You couldn’t penetrate someone if you tried.”

Clack.

“Shut up and take your black flirting out of the Mess Hall! No one’s interested in auspisticing for you two!” someone shouted at them.

One of them looked as if they were going to protest but the other pulled them away, heading straight for the door, and silence was restored again. No one other except for John seemed to blink an eye at the display and he quickly turned his attention back to the disgusting slop of food in his bowl. Trolls were weird and their romance seemed to be even weirder from the little that he could understand of it. 

His fork clinked against the bottom of the bowl again. He winced at the noise. That sound was almost an unappetizing as the food looked to be. If the smoosh of sauce and unknown meats could even be called food. They were unlike anything that he had ever seen before. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise by this point in time.

John pushed his half-eaten food away from him and stood from the deserted table. 

Nobody glanced his way.

Nobody thought of him.

He tried to think nothing of it as he walked towards the door with the intention of going back to the Commander’s room. Boredom started to grip a hold of him for the first time since he’d come to this place. It made his fingers twitch and his eyes flicker back and forth from one end of the hall to another as if something exciting would happen just by him wishing it to be so. 

The feeling vanished almost as soon as it had appeared as he turned around the corner, replaced with a bitter anticipation. Two trolls stood in the middle of the hall, conversing loudly with each other. John stuck to the wall as he walked towards them, making himself seem smaller than he already was in comparison to the two trolls. 

“What bullshit are you sprouting off now? You’re just making a big fuss over a silly, little rumour,” one of them said softly, her horns curling back around her ears.

The other shook his head sharply, his green eyes shining brightly, “I’m telling you that it’s the truth!”

John stalled, his steps growing slower. Karkat’s room wasn’t about to disappear any time soon. And if he didn’t stop completely than they would have no reason to think that he was listening in on their conversation. As far as they knew, he couldn’t understand even the barest wisp of their alien language.

As far as he knew, he shouldn’t have been able to understand it anyways. 

Regardless, he didn’t think that they’d even noticed him quite yet.

“Sorry, sweetcheeks, but you do tend to believe every rumour that you come across. The Commander already has his hands full with the one alien, what would he do with another one?” the first asked.

“I do not!” the second exclaimed, his voice deep, “Anyways, Risryll was telling me about this this morning. I’m sure that she was telling me the truth.”

“Risryll is almost as much of a gossip as you are. Except you’re far more gullible when people tell you these things..”

“Would you let me speak, dame! Sheesh, if I didn’t pity you so much…”

“Oh, do carry on then, dearie. But only because you pity me.”

The green-eyed troll glared but carried on, “Apparently, another one of those aliens has woken up. Except it was completely calm, unlike the other one. Like it knew what was going on or something. Didn’t have any fight to it or anything; at least the other one had had that in its favour. But there’s some sort of theory going around that the sopor slime isn’t-”

John pretended not to notice that the troll’s gaze was drilling deep into him. He forced one foot to move in front of the other, as if nothing had changed. It wouldn’t be difficult to implement the oblivious idiot routine, not now. Not when he’d had over twenty years of experience at perfecting it. This time around the act would just have to seem like it was reality. There was a lot more at stake than his dad getting angry at him for eating the sushi hidden away at the back of the fridge.

“Just ignore it, softie,” the first urged him on. “It can’t understand you anyways. Think of how meaningless their so-called language was back on their planet.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just creepy to see it walking around like this, even if the Commander’s quarters are somewhere around here.”

“You’ll survive.”

“You always say that, Msikah, but I never know if I should believe you.”

The woman’s clear laughter rang through the hall and as John looked back at them for a moment, he was able to see them as real people. The preconception he had of monsters and demons was ripped away for a few, brief moments and he imagined the lives that they had lived up until now. They didn’t seem as different from humans as he’d thought did. 

And then the memory of what they’d done slammed back into him. He quickly looked away, pretending that he’d never even looked at them in the first place.

“You’re still alive and well, aren’t you? Come on, we should get back to work before someone comes searching for us. They aren’t going to go easy on us just because we’re moirails. Hey, maybe you’ll be able to find out if there’s any truth behind that little rumour of yours, hunnybun,” the troll with the curled horns said.

The other turned around, heading back the way John had just come from, “I swear that your endearments just more and more embarrassing every time you open your mouth!”

“Always, my sweetest of hearts, always.”

There was a loud groan and their voices faded away as they went around the corner. 

John leaned against the wall, unsure of when he’d stopped walking. He noted half-heartedly that his hands were shaking, his mind preoccupied with what he’d just overheard. The world around him felt almost unreal, more like a dream than reality and definitely not a nightmare.

Someone else had woken up.

He wasn’t the only human on this ship who wasn’t unconscious. 

There was someone he could talk to, that would understand.

No matter how John thought about it, the words didn’t become any clearer to him. He knew what they meant, he knew what they’d been talking about but all he could do was stare blankly at the wall across from him as if someone had just told him something completely arbitrary. They might as well have been speaking in a foreign tongue; one that he wasn’t able to understand anyways. 

“Someone else woke up,” John muttered under his breath, feeling the weight of the words on his tongue. “Someone woke up. Someone’s awake. They’re… they’re awake!”

John pushed himself away from the wall, his lips spreading into a grin for the first time in what felt like ages. Someone else was awake. He broke out into a quick jog, going down the closest hallway. They were awake. His legs were burning from the exercise but he kept on going, ignoring the doors as he chose his route at random. 

He wasn’t going to be alone here anymore.

The hallways started to widen around him and he forced himself to slow to a walk as a troll passed by. Even still, he was walking as fast as he possibly could. The purposeful lack of glances shot at him wasn’t enough to slow him down; he barely even noticed that the trolls were there. 

His heart dropped down to his stomach as he suddenly stared down a hallway filled with long tubes brimming with slime. Slowing his pace, he headed down the row and peered into each tube, hoping that he would see something more than the faint outline of a person inside. Or nothing at all, preferably. 

But none of them were empty.

John clenched his teeth and tried to ignore the black ball of guilt in the pit of his stomach. It was stupid that he hadn’t tried to search for them before. Over twenty thousand people were packed away on this ship and not once had he come to see if any of them were people he’d once known. The idea to try and find this place hadn’t even occurred to him.

The only thing in his favour was that he was here now. He was here instead of hiding away in the Commander’s room like a frightened little child wanting their parents and now he was going to find the only other person who had woken up even if it ended up taking him days to do so. Yet, he still could not tear his eyes away from the people in the slime.

A prepubescent girl floated in the slime of one tube, a million miles away.

A large man batted at his own cheek though his movements were slowed by the thickness of the slime.

A young woman, her belly large with child.

An infant, oblivious to everything around it.

A gangly teen, all awkward proportions and thin limbs.

It was easy to see how each of them could have come from his city, from the place he’d grown up his entire life. But realistically, he knew that they could be from any corner of the earth, the fine details of their appearances lost for the time being. And at the same time, for all he knew, they could be one of his next door neighbours or someone from high school.

John watched the tubes, too big for the humans they held, hoping that one of them would be empty. The trolls that walked by fell silent at the sight of him, offering up no information that would have helped him. Or anything at all, for that matter. 

“Excuse me.”

John kept on walking, not registering that the troll speaking was speaking to him. His body stilled as a heavy hand suddenly came down on one of his shoulders, a shot of pain running through his body from one bruise or another.

“Tell me what you’re doing here,” they repeated, their voice harsh, “The Commander has obviously given you some sort of order to be here and I can’t let you go on unless you tell me what it is.”

If John hadn’t been paying attention over the time that he’d been stuck here, he wouldn’t have had the slightest idea that the troll talking to him was a woman when he turned to face them. She stood taller than almost any of the trolls that he had seen so far, towering over him at seven feet. The glow of her eyes was almost as bright as Karkat’s, only hers shone with a purple hue that was so different from Karkat’s demonic red. And then there were the strange fins that extended from her ears on either side of her head. 

Her lips pursed and she continued on, “Don’t keep silent, you’re not a mute. Just because no one else took the time to read the report on you does not mean that I didn’t. Now, tell me why the Commander has sent you here.”

“No reason, he - uh, he just wanted me to go out for a walk,” John replied, avoiding her eyes.

“There’s no need to hide it from-,” she cut herself off as her face relaxed, the frightening menace draining away, “Oh, I see. Well, one cannot say you’re not loyal. Please tell the Commander that there’s nothing amiss here.”

John blinked before forcing his face into a smile, laughing nervously. “Yeah, I’ll do that. It’ll be the first thing that I tell him, don’t worry.”

“Very well. Good day then.”

She carefully removed her hand from John’s shoulder and turned, walking away as if nothing had happened. Someone joined a few moments later, talking about something excitedly and waving a clipboard around. 

John waited until she was well out of sight before rubbing at his throat. Talking was still quite stressful with the strange hisses and clicks to the language. He’d spent hours in the mirror, trying to switch back to the familiar sounds of English but no matter how much he tried, those same sounds always managed to escape him. Or come out as a butchered attempt of his first language. 

Sometimes it seemed like those painful hours spent in perpetual darkness had changed him in ways that he could never even imagine.

Pushing the thought from his mind, John looked down both ends of the long hallway. He clutched onto his earlier hope as much as he could but there was no denying that there was at least two miles between him and the end of the hall from either direction, if not more. Even if he wanted nothing more than to find this person, he couldn’t do it by searching here. 

Otherwise he would be here for days.  
A wide entrance caught his eye, not far from where he stood. It seemed important but as he watched, he noticed that there was no stream of traffic going in or out of it. 

And just like that, he could feel his old thirst for adventure digging its way into him. It had to lead somewhere, everything in this place seemed to have one purpose or another. There were too many people on this ship for there to be a bunch of empty rooms in the middle of an area like this. Even if they had been used for storage than there would have been someone coming in or out.

There was a certain skip to his steps as he bee-lined towards the entranceway. This time the trolls walking by did nothing to hold back their looks of curiosity and disgust. But all John could think of was what was down that hallway and why were people avoiding it. However, his curiosity only peaked as he glanced down the hallway.

Nobody was there.

The shorter hallway was entirely free of people and doors alike. Only one door was at the very end of the hallway, a sign on the door dictating what it was in the troll’s strange alphabet. Even the air seemed to be different here; heavier and filled with an electrical current. 

Except the door wouldn’t open when John stepped in front of it. The door was identical to every other door in this place but it didn’t zoom up the moment he stepped in front of it and from what he could see, there was nothing jarring it from doing so. He ran his hand over its surface but no weird lights appeared nor any mysterious number pads like in the movies. Defeated, he turned back around and headed back towards the row of tubes.

“What are you doing here?” 

John whipped back around, immediately spotting the Commander and the door falling closed behind him. “What am I doing here? Well, isn’t it obvious? I’m exploring!”

“I don’t think I ever heard anything more idiotic than what just came out of your mouth,” Karkat said, scowling.

“Hehehe, you should try it someday!”

Karkat rolled his eyes dramatically and started to walk away, John almost jogging in order to keep up with him. “There would be no point in so much as trying to find something new in this place. If it’s still the same as when I first got here than nothing’s ever going to change.”

“So, what were you doing in there? I tried to check it out but the door wouldn’t open for some reason.”

“Since when are you as happy as a wriggler in a pile of foot warmers? You’ve been moping around ever since you came here like you think it’s your fault that we raided your planet. If it wasn’t keeping you quiet, I would have slapped you for it days ago. It got to the point where I just assumed that that was what you were like normally,” Karkat snapped.

“Nope!” John replied, his spirits dampened for a brief moment as a troll glared at him as they walked by, “I’m not normally like that at all. I’m usually the opposite, in fact.”

“Fuck me with a rusty spoonkind.”

“Still, what were you doing in there?” 

Karkat looked away, his pace quickening as he led them through the halls.

“Karkat?”

“It’s the ‘Commander’ to you, alien. And I was visiting a friend. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Oh.” 

“Yeah, oh.”

Both of them came to a stop for a moment and John could vaguely recognize their surroundings as being right in front of Karkat’s room. He hesitated for a moment before going inside, the pile of blankets and the strange contraption just as he’d left it earlier.

Karkat didn’t follow him inside.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What? A new chapter? So soon? 
> 
> I worked long and hard this week to get this written and now here it is... Totally didn't plan to post this yesterday though. That definitely wasn't the plan. Just like how I didn't get a bit too caught up in revisions until I felt a bit more comfortable in posting this.

“Get up.”

John grumbled, grabbing one of the numerous blankets that made up his bed and pulling it up over his head. It felt as if he’d fallen asleep only moments before; a far cry from the full night’s sleep he needed. And if he’d been dreaming, there was no way that he could remember what it had been about now.

“Don’t you dare go back to sleep. If you do than we’ll both be doomed to an existence at the whims of her Royal Sadist. I promise you that within a sweep, we’d be begging her to stab us with her 2x3dentkind, just to end our misery,” the voice insisted.

“Go. Away,” John groaned.

There was a moment of silence and he hoped that meant that they’d left so that he could get some more sleep. He was sure he’d thank them for letting him go back to sleep later, when he was conscious. The warmth of the blankets around him was just far too tempting to resist at that moment. Not to mention that he felt like he could still sleep for the next twelve hours at the very least. 

His eyes shot open just before one of the blankets underneath him was ripped away, sending him tumbling straight to the floor. A rather unmanly squeak came from his mouth and his eyes shot open. The Commander was standing over top of him, a scowl etched into his face.

“Get up. We have to get going now,” Karkat snapped, leaving no room for anything other than business. 

“Go? What are you talking about?” John mumbled, his mind still stuck in a sleep-ridden haze. 

“Just get up and you’ll fucking see soon enough!”

Karkat grabbed a hold of his arm and hoisted him up from the floor. John didn’t even get the chance to stand up properly before he was being half-dragged out of the room, incapable of finding the time to stop himself from tripping over his own feet. The red-eyed troll was on a mission. It wasn’t until they were a few minutes away from Karkat’s room that John was able to regain his footing and once he did, the tight grip around his upper arm disappeared. 

The look on Karkat’s face was harsh, almost carved into the thick, grey skin. He didn’t so much as spare a glance over at John as he rushed through the halls, turning around corners without the slightest bit of hesitation. 

“What’s going on?” John asked, frowning as he fought to keep up.

Karkat scowled at him, the look on his face murderous. “More than you could ever hope to imagine. Now, kindly shut your mouth for two minutes and then both of us will be able to figure out the answer to your question.”

John blinked, his pace slowing for a or two moment before he ran to catch up to the red-eyed alien. He didn’t doubt that he would be left behind if he dawdled around for longer than a moment or two. Adrenaline started to rush through his veins from Karkat’s urgency and his earlier sleepiness was easily swept away.

They hurried through the halls for a few minutes longer before Karkat turned into a room while John followed closely behind him. It took John a moment to realize just what was going on. Five trolls were gathered around a bed in the middle of the room and he realized with a debilitating clarity that the person on the bed was human. Human, at least five years younger than he was and very much female.

“What’s going on?” he demanded, his fear leaking through his words.

“Does it look like we know?” a troll with branching horns snapped, his lips pulling back to reveal sharp, yellowed teeth.

Another rolled her green, glowing eyes. “It’s been here for approximately two seconds, Valtay. We told you to be nice.”

“There’s something wrong with this one but we’re not sure what exactly. All we know was that everything was fine up until a few when we got an alert, saying that there was something wrong with it. By the time we got here, its skin had already turned this strange colour and-”

“And it’s having trouble breathing. Among other things. We called the Commander and then he suggested that you might know what’s going on on the account of you being the same species and all,” a fourth troll cut in, her cobalt eyes betraying her urgency.

“I…,” John trailed off and shook his head, “I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you expect me to do. I’m not a doctor or anything. I’ve only taken a bit of basic first aid, really. I’m just me.”

Karkat snorted. “That doesn’t mean that you don’t know more than any of these fuckfaces.”

He hesitated for a moment but the other trolls had already backed away from the girl lying on the table so that he could get closer. And the closer he got, the easier it was to see that there was something horribly wrong with her. Red, painful-looking blotches covered most of her skin and her breathing was laboured. Even her lips seemed raw and irritated from dehydration. 

John cautiously put his fingers up to her throat, feeling for her pulse. His eyes were carefully averted away from her bare body; he wanted to give her the little dignity that she had left. It didn’t matter much because she wouldn’t be aware of it either way but that didn’t make much of a difference to him. It took him a few moments to find her pulse, his fingers fumbling with the unfamiliar motion. When he did find it, the beating was faint and irregular. He pulled his hand away and stared at her face in shock. 

“What’s wrong with her?” John asked again, turning to the others.

“We truly don’t know. It’s… she’s been like this for at least the past hour now,” the last troll finally spoke up, his voice soft.

John looked back at her and shook his head, taking a step back. “I… this isn’t something I can do anything about! I don’t know what it was that you were expecting from me but I don’t know the first thing about this sort of thing. I can’t even look at blood without almost fainting!”

“Surely you could give us some suggestions for treating the symptoms it has! That way we could at least try to figure out what’s wrong with it before it dies!” the troll who had snapped at him earlier said. 

“I-I can’t.”

Somebody tried to touch his shoulder. It was immediately shrugged off and then he was running out of the room. Staying in that room wasn’t an option, not when the walls had started to close in on him, making the room get smaller and smaller until he felt like he was suffocated. It took everything he had not to run through the halls as well. Instead, he squatted down beside the door, shoving his head between his knees as his body shook. 

They wanted far too much from him. 

He was just John. Nobody special. Not someone who was capable of saving another person’s life. That wasn’t even a possibility when he knew that she would die even if he didn’t try and save her. Nobody would be able to live long with a pulse like that. The only thing he would do was end up making her suffer even more than she needed to. He was certain of it. 

His body stilled as he heard the swish of the door opening and closing. He kept his head down, refusing to look over at whoever had been sent out to talk to him. A simple pep talk wasn’t about to change his mind about this, no matter what they had to tell him. Outside of the basics of doing CPR or putting on a band-aid, the only things he knew about the human body had come from his biology class back in high school. Even then, he had almost failed the course entirely because he’d been so much more interested in the social aspects of school instead of the academic ones.

“You’re pathetic,” the Commander spoke up, breaking the silence.

“I know. You don’t have to tell me that,” John mumbled into his pants.

“I think I do. I’d rather cut out my own bloodpusher and hand it to you with my mutant blood still pouring out of it before I was reduced to the pile of useless fucking shit that you are right about now,” the Commander insisted.

He laughed hollowly. “I’d do the same right now if you gave me a knife.” 

John breathed in the smell of his pants in a futile attempt to keep his body from shaking. When he thought that Karkat had finally given up on the non-existent chance of him going back into that horror of a room, he looked up. Karkat still stood there, his lips pursed. It looked as if it was taking every bit of the Commander’s self control not to snap at him again. The furthest thing from giving up, really.

“You might as well give up now. It’s not going to make a difference,” John snapped, “I’m not going back in there. I wouldn’t be able to do anything except put her through more pain anyways! Why do you even care whether she lives or dies? She’s just another human to you! One of hundreds of thousands!”

“I wish you didn’t have notes glued all over the mostly empty vastness of your fucking mind that tell you that I’m a horrible person who wants nothing more than to see all of your alien species die in the most horrific way possible! I’m not the Condesce and I will never be the least bit like her. You, on the other hand, won’t even do the little that you can to try and help save that thing’s life. To think that at one point in time, I thought you were decent for an alien!” Karkat growled back at him.

“Then maybe you should have been more observant and noticed how useless I am before now. I mean, it’s pretty fucking obvious if you ask me!”

“There’s only one other person I’ve ever met who’s as self-depreciative as you are and trust me, he’s made a lot more out of his situation then you have.”

“Well, good for him then.”

They came to a standstill, neither of them saying anything else.

John’s teeth were clenched together and he forced himself to stay kneeling close to the ground. Everything would run so much more smoothly if Karkat had it in him to just accept that there was nothing that John could do about this. He wasn’t a doctor. He could barely tell the difference a cold and a flu, even though he’d had both many times over the course of his life. 

Even then, how long would it be before the girl lying helplessly on that table was dead? An hour, maybe two at the best. And what would be the point of it all anyways? Chances were that she would end up dead at the end of all this. Murdered in cold blood.

“Why should I do this?” John asked, quietly.

“She’s young. She won’t be killed if she manages to survive this. That’ll be the elderly, for the most part and even then they’re only being killed because those damn rebels won’t stick a footwarmer in it and accept that their lives won’t get any better. Life isn’t some sort of perfect fantasy where everyone gets what they want like they think it is,” Karkat replied, looking over at the door.

“But would that life be worth living? I could help and then she will probably just end up living the rest of her life in misery! What would be the point of that?”

“Neither of us can know whether or not it’s going to be worth it! But that’s not up to us to decide for her anyways. Even if her life does turn out like shit, we can’t take away the chance of her having a perfectly happy life.”

John laughed weakly and it felt like something inside of him was broken, driving him to say these things. “And do you really believe that there’s any chance of her being happy now? Everything she’s ever known - everything I’ve ever known! - has been destroyed and the best thing that she can hope for is to be sent to some strange planet to do hard labour for the rest of her days. Tom me, that’s not a life worth living.”

“But it might be for her. That’s not something we’ll ever get to find out unless you do something about it right now.”

“I can’t!”

John’s body started to shake again and he sat down the rest of the way, clutching at his knees. He wished that Karkat had never woken him up. Then he wouldn’t know about the girl laying on that cold table, just on the verge of dying. If he was still laying on his pile of blankets than he could have been oblivious to the rest of the world around him, including just how much of a coward he was. But now this had become something that he’d have to deal with. If not the actual act of trying to help than the knowledge that he could have done something but didn’t.

The backs of John’s eyes burned as he buried his face into his pants once more. He could still feel Karkat’s stare on him and knew he would see the disappointment and disgust if he looked up at him. He didn’t need the reminder when there was a little voice in the back of his mind reminding him of that exact same thing.

The door opened, revealing the troll with cobalt eyes. “Get in here, both of you! It’s starting to regain consciousness, we think.”

Karkat let his gaze linger for a few moments longer before he followed the troll back inside of the room. The door closed behind them and John was left in the hallway by himself.

He stayed where he was, weighing his options carefully. There were two different things that he could do right about now. Either he could get up and walk back to the Commander’s room, tossing away the miniscule hope that the girl had of keeping life or he could walk back inside that room and do whatever he could to try and save her. 

It was as simple as that. 

After this, he wouldn’t have any more control over whether she lived or died.

His gut was tearing him in both directions, neither option winning over the other. Suddenly, his face went slack as he thought of his dad. He knew what his dad would do. And he knew what he needed to do to make his dad proud of him, just his dad had always claimed he was.

Leaving that girl there to die wasn’t something that would make his dad proud of him.

John slowly wiped the tears from his eyes and walked back into the room. The trolls had gathered around the bed again, barely giving the naked girl enough space to even breath. The quieter one glanced over at him for a moment but then quickly went back to writing something down on a clipboard. The rest of them hadn’t seemed to notice that he was standing there. They were talking in hushed whispers, whispers that John hoped consisted of the possibilities of what could be wrong with her and not something with far worse intentions.

He took a step closer and then another until he could see the way her eyelids were fluttering. There would only be a few more moments until she woke up to the sight of demons crowding around her. And if the thin metal rings around her ankles and wrists were anything to go by, she wouldn’t be able to move on top of all that. 

“Hey, you guys?” John spoke up, uncertain of quite what to say, “Do you think you could move away from her a bit?”

“No,” one of them snapped, not even looking over at him as he talked, “We have to be able to monitor what happens to it while it wakes up. Without your help, we can’t take any chances, even if it means its peace of mind. There’s a chance that something like this could happen again and we need to get as much from this now so that we can prevent it in the future.”

“I’ll do it. Help, I mean. Just step away her.”

A couple of them exchanged looks. John wasn’t able to tell just what they were trying to convey to each other but without another word, all of them stepped back so that they would be just outside of her line of sight. 

Her eyelids fluttered again as John quickly stepped forward. Once he was next to the table, he was able to see her eyes moving quickly from underneath her eyelids and the movements were getting more and more deliberate by the second. At the same time, her body had tensed and she was starting to fight against her restraints.

“Wake up,” John whispered, reaching forward to shake her shoulder.

She groaned, soft enough that he could barely see it, but her eyes refused to open. John couldn’t blame her, not really. Knowing the things that he did, he would have slept for as long as possible. He was more surprised that she was still about to sleep when her life was on line like this. 

John shook her shoulder again. This time, she opened her hazy eyes and stared at him, her gaze reaching right into his very soul. They were green, he couldn’t help but note. They fit well with her thick, dark brown hair and fair complexion. She was beautiful. He forced the thoughts out of his mind. He couldn’t think about such things right now, not when he could see the panic starting to form. Not when she was tied down to a metal table on an alien ship.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her tongue thick in her mouth, “Where am I?”

John froze. Both sides of his mind were warring back and forth between each other. She was near death but he couldn’t turn back now. He’d promised himself that he wouldn’t give up on her now. 

“You’re…,” he trailed off for a moment, looking around him and taking in the strange, mad world he’d fallen into, “Safe. You’re going to be safe here. How are you feeling?”

“It… it hurts,” she forced out.

Her features scrunched up in the pain that she seemed to have just noticed. When she noticed the restraints that held her in place, she started to fight against them. John forced himself to look the other way. She would only do herself more harm if he convinced the others to release her from them. Not to mention the hysteria that would surely overcome her the moment she saw the trolls gathered in the room. Once she entered that state, there would be no helping her.

And then she was looking straight at him. 

He couldn’t stop himself from watching as tears built up in her eyes, as she started to realize that there was something not right about any of this. All he could do was stand there, incapable of looking away and incapable of reassuring her more than he already had. 

That would only be a filthy lie.

“Please,” she begged him, her words hysterical, “Let me go! It itches so badly. I just want to scratch it!”

“I can’t. You’d only hurt yourself.” John tried to sound as convincing as he could, finally managing to tear his eyes away from her. But the moment he looked back, he knew that his words had had the opposite effect.

“What are you doing to me? Let me go!” she screeched, her efforts increasing tenfold. 

And then she started to scream.

John faltered, his eyes widening as he stared at her. Before he noticed what he was doing, he was shaking his head and slowly walking backwards. It felt as if she had managed to grab a hold of his heart and was trying to rip it out of his chest with only her voice. He tried to ignore it, he tried to convince himself that this wasn’t his fault but the unspoken words rang hollow. 

A hand rested on his shoulder, only to disappear mere moments later as he flinched at the contact. One of the trolls stepped forward to stand beside him. She didn’t seem to notice the appearance of another person, far too caught up in her hysterical screams to notice much of anything else.

“It’s nothing against you,” the soft-spoken troll tried to reassure him, “I would bet anything that she somehow consumed some of the sopor slime. It tends to do… funny things to people, though I’ve never seen a reaction quite like this.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it if that thing doesn’t even have a clue of what’s going on right now!” another agreed.

The rest of them quietly muttered their agreement. The Commander was the only one to stay silent as he leaned against the far counter, watching them all. There was an intensity in his gaze as he stared at them and it seemed as if John was the only one who noticed it. He made a show of not looking away when John looked over at him, his jaw set stubbornly.

The screams suddenly grew quieter and John pretended that he couldn’t hear the faint whimper in them. Everyone stood there for a moment, taking it in.

“What are you all doing?” the troll with the branching horns snapped. “Don’t just stand there and stare at it. We need to diagnose it!”

“Oh, right! Sorry,” John mumbled, turning back to the table.

The room was suddenly silent again, though she was still clearly conscious, her eyes flickering around the room. Or at least, the little of it that she could see. John saw that her wrists had already turned a bright red from the abuse they’d suffered and dark bruises would probably form within the hour. Even still, she looked as if she was playing on the painful edge of hysteria. He could tell from the wild look her eyes.

John would be able to reason with her, not right now. Maybe never.

The trolls were careful not to step into her line of sight, even as he stepped forward to take her pulse. It was even more erratic than it had been earlier, only made worse from the stress. John patted her down and whispered his apologies as he touched her bare skin. All of her joints had swelled up and he could tell that it wasn’t just from the restraints.

John turned towards a troll with horns curving over his head for a moment, “Do you know the exact symptoms that she has? I know that I asked about it earlier but could you tell me again, just to remind me?”

“It has trouble breathing, red blotches on its skin, a seeming irregular beat of its bloodpusher, and as you’ve just noticed, an increase in the puffiness of the limb connectors,” the troll responded, curtly.

“Also, there seems to be some sort of chemical imbalance in its blood,” the cobalt eyed troll said.

“Is there someone else there?” the girl cried out. “What are you-”

She broke into a fit of wheezing coughs. Any colour that might have filled her cheeks in the last few minutes quickly drained away and she was left with the appearance of the walking dead. John forced himself to look away as her shoulders jerked against the restraints. The natural movement shouldn’t have been restricted like that but there was nothing that he could have done about it. At least, not without even worse consequences.

It took everything that John had to stay rooted to his spot, to not rush out of the room again. He focused in on his breathing, shutting out everything else around him. He hoped that it would calm him down but all he could think of was fleeing. 

His dad. 

He had to remember his dad.

John forced his eyes open again and looked at the teenager. “Where does it hurt the most?” 

“Stop it!” she shouted, her voice weaker than it had been before.

He repeated the question.

“I don’t understand you! Just… just stop talking to me before you’re swallowed whole!”

John’s heart dropped down to his stomach and he couldn’t stop himself from taking a step back again. He felt sick, disgusted with himself. He deserved to be shot in the gut and allowed to bleed out. Every word he spoke was filled with the harsh growls and clicks of this new language he’d come across instead of the soft, lilting tones of the English he’d always known. Somehow, in the midst of everything, he’d forgotten about that.

And there was no way to reverse that damage. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, trying his best to say them the way he would have not that long ago.

Even then the only thing that came from his mouth was the alien tongue. His throat seemed to ache even at the motion of trying to speak English. He started to blink quickly, the world blurring in front of him. 

She started to thrash again and John realized with a jump that one of the trolls had taken a step forward, just into her line of sight. There was no way anyone could have made sense of her screaming, even if they had known English their entire life like he had. Except the rest of them didn’t seem to think twice at the sound of the screaming. It made John sick to think of why that was.

Just as suddenly as the thrashing had started, her eyes rolled back into her head and the screaming stopped as she lost consciousness. A moment went by. And then another. John stared at her. The only thing that he could hear now was her faltering breath. 

There wasn’t much time left now.

“Is it really just the slime stuff that’s making her act like that?” John whispered.

For the first time since they’d come back into the room, Karkat spoke, “I doubt it. It’s probably only enhancing the feeling of her world being shaken around like a see-through globe filled with white powder. Especially when you compare it to how you reacted when you were pulled out of that recuperacoon.” 

“I see.”

John continued to stare at the girl’s form, wishing that the answers would just come to him without any more trouble. It felt as if there was something there that he wasn’t quite getting. The knowledge was just hanging around the edges, barely letting him know that it was there at all. 

Just like that, he decided to run over everything that he knew again. She was having trouble breathing. All of her joints were painfully swollen. Her skin was covered almost entirely by rashes. Her heartbeat was irregular. There was some sort of chemical imbalance inside of her. And she was incredibly itchy. Except that it felt as if he was missing something important.

John’s eyes widened. 

She’d consumed some of that weird slime stuff. 

Everything suddenly clicked together and he wanted to hit himself at how simple it all really was. This was something that should have occurred to him right away, not now, because it was stuff that he was supposed to know. Stuff that he’d spent his entire life knowing.

“She’s having an allergic reaction to the slime,” he announced.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope that you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! This will also be posted to my tumblr account. You're more than welcome to follow me there at serendipitousdescent.tumblr.com if you want. (Totally not blatant self-advertisement. Of course not.)


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